Personal blog where I share my thoughts/lessons/achievements

Personal Journal – Essential Tool for Personal Success

What does it take to get to the top of your chosen field, industry or job? You would never know that if you haven’t written anything down. If you are really serious about becoming a wealthy, happy and successful person, than you have to keep a journal. But why do you need a personal journal? Well it’s simple. You can’t trust your memory. Keep a track of your progress. It’s an essential tool for success.

When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you came across something very important, write it down. This is important to keep such information at one place. It gives you a better understanding of yourself and your dominant thoughts. Whenever you think in your mind, you are not aware of how does your thoughts alter and change. Your mind always drifts from one thought to another.

Carefully observing and capturing important thoughts, we create a mental clue. Now we are fully aware of what goes in our mind, because only then we see things as they are, not the way we think they are. It gives us a better view of our mental process so we could analyze how and why we think that way. We create opportunity to alter our thoughts, change the way we think and the way we act upon what we think.

If you want to become successful, you have to study success. You have to become a serious student and keeping journal is the best indicator of how serious you are. The discipline of keeping a personal journal makes up a valuable part to learning process. Learning is a natural way of growing. We learn from the begging of our life. Taking our first steps, learning first words, skills and many other things. Keeping a personal journal is a advanced and serious learning, which would skyrocket your chances of success.

How To Keep A Journal

First you have to own a journal. I would recommend getting a blank book without anything written in it. Also I would suggest you buy it more expensive one, so it would make sense to write down only valuable ideas and thoughts.

Now you have to decide what you want to write down and organize it into sections. Let’s look at what we want to capture into our personal journals.

Goals

Setting and achieving goals is a core of your success. Knowing where you want to go is the first step towards your realization. Keeping goals in your personal journey will not only be at your hand for future reference but also for motivation. Whenever you feel out of hand, just by looking at what you have set to achieve my energize you.

One of the simple ways of keeping your goals is to write about your ideal life. What is your ideal job, income, home, lifestyle, character, spouse, relationship, family life and so on? Create an ideal life of yours and write in clear, vivid manner, so you could visualize as you have already achieved it.

Great Ideas

Many great ideas fade as quickly as they arise. So keeping a journal gives an advantage over your memory. But how can you define, great ideas? Well it depends from what is important to you and how that particular idea can contribute to your purpose or goals. It could personal ideas about improving your personal life. Maybe it would be financial ideas, about how to deal with money, or how to make money work for you. O maybe you have thought of a great business idea, which would shake the marketplace.

Whenever you came up with a great idea, write it down and think of it for a moment. You will be surprised how one idea can lead to another, even better one. But the most important thing is to identify only best ideas, which can be integrated into our daily lives.

Observations

Looking around and seeing things that matter the most to us and writing it down, clears our thoughts. Observing everyone and everything on daily basis makes us aware of what happens around. We become human beings. We observe what is beautiful to us and we live in this moment, in the present time, not wondering with our mind where we could be or what we could be doing.

Observing our emotions is important aspect of daily observations. Emotions are like reflections of your identity. Negative emotions reveal your weakness. You can work them out by finding the roots of it and solving it in a creative manner. Positive emotions reveal what makes us happy. Imagine your mind as a garden and emotions as its seeds. If you would let weeds to grow, would it make you garden look better and make you feel better? I don’t think so. So write it down and work it out.

When we see something amazing, we usually take it as a picture in camera or mind. Taking mental pictures and rewriting them in personal journey gives us a long lasting feeling, which you can rewind and re-experience once again and use it for future. Whenever you would feel bad, all you need to do is to look at your personal journal and re-experience an event when you felt happy. It makes a life much easier, doesn’t?

Observing people who makes impacts on us gives us advantage over ourselves and them. We can become aware of who influence us and how we go about it. When people inspire us, we want to know how they do this. Learn from others and study their behavior, character, attitude and everything else that you can find useful about them.

Experiences

Our thought has brought us here where we are at the moment. Looking back into past is painful and everyone usually suggest that you forget it. I say don’t. Let past become your school, your teacher. Learn from past experience so you could become a wiser and stronger person.

Be true to yourself and don’t hide from your past. Remember your failures and learn from them, why have you failed, how would go about it now and what have you learned from this experience. Also list your biggest achievements and workout how have you achieved it, who helped you and what was the recipe for your achievement.

Books

Highlighting books is essential if you want to learn something from them. Whenever you are reading a book, make an effort to highlight the ideas that you found useful and appealing to yourself and write it down. In this way you will discipline yourself to become a better student and your learning process will become more fruitful and rewarding.

Quotes

These little phrases are very helpful in your daily life. Quotes can bring meaning, motivation and inspiration in your life. They can even become your life motto. So writing them down makes sense. Collecting quotes is like collecting little puzzle of your personal philosophy. Write only those quotes which makes sense, makes you feel good and can be integrated in your daily life.

Seminars/Video Trainings

It makes sense to take notes into personal journey as it can play a similar role as quotes and books. Highlight the idea which have touched you in some way and analyze it. Make that idea work for you. Integrate it and keep it safe in your personal journal and deep inside your mind.

Personal Journaling Habit

Having said so much it would seem like an easy way to start, but actually, to keep a personal journal takes self-discipline. If you only jot down once a week it’s not going to help you to benefit from this powerful tool. Think of it as a daily tool to track your daily life and progress. Like any tool, it takes some time to master it so you have to develop a habit for writing a personal journal.

Now imagine yourself if you are fully aware of your thoughts. Think of how enormously you would benefit if you would employ this simple and yet very powerful tool. It has a great potential to turn your life around and bring you back on the track. This tool alone can bring amazing results if you will use it to measure your effort, keep track of personal development and integrate ideas into your daily life.